6 Emerging Brands Making the Bad-Weather Shoes of the Future
Hiking shoes have been tearing up a lot more than mountain trails recently. The lace-ups once reserved for areas of the world with record-holding elevation data have long since landed on the feet of cosplaying art directors and outdoors-minded baristas alike. By now, you’re probably familiar with shoe brands like Salomon and Merrell—and maybe even Scarpa and La Sportiva. We’re not here to talk about those shoe brands. Today, we’re here to talk about the ones you aren’t familiar with, the bleeding-edge upstarts and slept-on independents behind some of the best rocky-terrain footwear on the planet.
How did we get here? For one, the material innovations that used to be the exclusive territory of big-name companies with even bigger budgets are now a little more accessible. Thanks to brands like Vibram—whose world-class soles can be grafted onto nearly any silhouette, at minimal extra cost—and what I like to think of as a widening utility gap—the delta between what you actually need a product to do and what it’s designed to do—a niche in the market opened for well-made, durable shoes that wear their outdoors bona fides lightly.
In 2025, that niche is a lot more crowded than it used to be. A cottage industry of smaller, independent shoe brands—hailing from the foothills of the Dolomites to the outskirts of the Finnish woods—has emerged to outfit those art directors, baristas, and, sure, actual mountaineers. While the Goliaths rest on their laurels, the up-and-coming brands below are busy making the trail shoes of the future—and they won’t be remotely offended if you rock their kicks anywhere but.
Diemme
Born in the foothills of the Dolomites, Diemme makes all its shoes in a single factory in the town of Onè di Fonte, Italy, which happens to be historically renowned for its shoemaking prowess. The end result isn’t cheap, but the level of craftsmanship and degree of detail applied to each pair tends to justify the price tag multiple times over. Just think about it this way: it’s notoriously tricky to find shoes this handsome even when they’re not this hardy—and it’s even trickier to find ‘em from a brand with Diemme’s pedigree.
ROA
ROA was founded in Italy in 2015, and it remains one of the more avant-garde imprints in this group (a sentiment that applies to the brand’s new-ish clothing line, too, which is worth checking out). Over the years, ROA has mastered the dark arts of merging delightfully bonkers designs with next-level functionality. Everything the brand makes looks a bit like a late stage experiment, but in a way that makes you feel like you’re an early adopter, not a beta tester.
Tarvas
The team behind Tarvas spends a lot of time in the Finnish woods—hiking, trekking, and otherwise reveling in the unforgiving terrain. When they’re not in the woods, though, they’re based in Helsinki, which boasts its own scary-weather considerations to contend with. The result of that split residency is an assortment of shoes, headlined by the house-speciality Easy Hikers, that are frighteningly adept at handling the shittiest conditions on the planet, whether you encounter them in your backyard or miles away from the city.
Norda
Norda makes one thing and one thing only: trail running shoes built to handle the kind of terrain that usually makes running impossible. Even if you’re not into trail running, the features that define its kicks—breathable uppers, suction-like traction, shock-absorbing midsoles—also happen to make for great running shoes, period.
Playground
Playground is probably the most obscure brand on this list and, until recently, was practically impossible to find outside of Japan. But when it comes to specs, its pedigree is just about unimpeachable. Every pair of its shoes features a burly, high-traction Vibram sole, nails-tough uppers, one of the coolest lacing systems in a market crowded with ’em. (Keep an eye out for waterproof Gore-Tex membranes.) Are they easy to find? Absolutely not—but they’re finally available in-store stateside (in Silver Lake, if you happen to be in the area) and that alone is worth celebrating.
Oakley Factory
A few years ago, Oakley let Brain Dead designer Kyle Ng loose in its extensive backlog of archival hits—and the rest, as they say, is history. For anyone familiar with Ng’s work at his own brand, the results have been as good as expected. The hulking Chop Saw silhouette gets a lot of shine in specific corners of the internet—rightfully so: the midsole looks like a Sherman tank and a BattleBot caught mid-scrap—but sleep on the rest of the line at your own peril.
